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Baffled Newbie

Normally I've pretty good at googling problems but this time I'm stumped, although I have to admit I'm not too hot with linux. I apologise for the lenghty post, but I've always found it's better to give a bit too much info than a bit too little, and as I'm very new with bt, I probably don't know what's really relevant.

The hardware I have available to me is one Dell Vostro 1500 originally fitted with a Dell 1397 Wireless card (BCM 4322 I believe), and one Dell Latitude E4300 originally fitted with and Dell 1510 Wireless card (BCM 4312 I believe). The e4300 has a dead ethernet port, but I would really prefer to get this working as the 1500/BCM4322 is only on loan to me.

I initally tried BT5 from USB and installed on the E4300 / BCM 4322 and had no joy. I could not get it to connect to anything - iirc it kept saying incorrect password even though I knew it was correct. Tried using wicd and manually via command line, although iirc at the time I didn't realise I would need to install another package to get WPA working with command line.

Then I tried with the 1500 / BCM 4312. I managed to get this working, although when testing MITM, I had very poor results. It would work properly for all devices on the WLAN and even the LAN it was connected to, but approx 50% of pages would fail to load and needed a refresh to get them to work.

Then I tried swapping the wnic's between the laptops. Now on the 4300 / BCM4312, when I should get the login prompt I get:

My only attempt at resolving this was to upgrade the laptop BIOS from A14 to latest A24 which made no difference.

Reading around this error it appears I need to downgrade the kernel, but I'm stuck as my wired nic is dead and my wireless nic won't connect. If I try to connect wirelessly:

If I try to connect using wicd without static ip address,
with an unsecured network I see a handful of layer 3 traffic and a DHCP discover from the laptop but no DHCP reply and wicd eventually says Connection failed :unable to get ip address
with a WEP network I can see all sorts of layer 2 traffic, even DHCP discovers from the laptop but no DHCP reply or any layer 3 traffic , wicd says Connection failed : unable to get ip address,
with a WPA network I get the same,
and using WPA2 I can only see a handful of ICMPv6 in wireshark and wicd say Connection failed : bad password

If I set static ip details valid for the relevant subnet, then

With an unsecured network I can see some layer 2 traffic but wicd says Connection failed : could not contact the wireless point
with WEP I see the same
with WPA I see the same
with WPA2 I see no traffic and wicd says Connection failed : bad password

The mad thing is this wifi card worked in the vostro. If I go back to the vostro, I forgot the results but I was able to connect to some types of network but not all. From that I can conclude it's not worth trying to mess with the BCM4322, but the BCM4312 has shown it can work in the vostro but not in the latitude.

So from my brief testing/ elimination, my suspicion is the BCM4322 is not much good for backtrack, and for some reason 4322 and 4312 are not working right in Latitude E4300, although only the 4312 shows the error previously mentioned. Also as performance of the 4312 was poor, I thought I would remove a wireless nic from a reasonably recent wireless n router. In there I found a bcm94322mp2d - I believe this is a 4322. So if the 4322 is good enough to run a router with multiple clients, I'm surprised it's not doing to well for me - when I briefly tested the Vostro with the 4322 from the Latitude I also saw aroudn 50% of pages error and need to be reloaded.

If anyone has any ideas on what I may be doing wrong and how to get the Latitude behaving I would be very grateful.

Here's the output of lspci on the Latitude E4300 with BCM 4312: (I also got the dmesg info but that was way too longer than permissible in one forum post)